Health

Related media - Related media When she focused on the bequest, she realized immediately what she wanted to do, she recalled. “I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they would receive free tuition,” she said. There was enough money to do that in perpetuity, she said. Over the years, she had interviewed dozens of prospective Einstein medical students. Tuition is more than $59,000 a year, and many graduated with crushing medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 percent of its students owed more than $200,000 after graduating. At most other New York City medical schools, less than 25 percent of new doctors owed that much. Almost half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers, and nearly 60 percent are women. About 48 percent of current medical stude...

Linked media - Linked media “What we really need is an evolving, specialized recycling infrastructure alongside the big five — paper, glass, plastic, metal and cardboard,” said Mitch Ratcliffe, publisher of the website Earth911. “That conversation is really picking up steam in some particular categories, but not in medical equipment at all.” A few designers and companies are exploring alternatives that are more reusable or safer for the environment. Inhalers The inhalers that many people use for treatment of asthma or other respiratory ailments contain potentially recyclable materials. But those with leftover medication or propellants may also be hazardous if incinerated or compacted. The steel or aluminum canisters containing the medication should generally be returned to a pharmacy...

Associated media - Related media How do I know if my children have high blood-lead levels? Lead exposure can go unnoticed until levels accumulate, doctors say. High levels of lead can result in stomach pain, vomiting, fatigue, learning difficulties, developmental delays and even seizures. Pediatricians recommend blood tests for infants and toddlers who live in homes built before 1978 or have other risk factors. Medicaid programs and some states require screening, but it is not typically advised for children older than 3. While officials have said there is no safe level of lead, parents do not automatically need to worry if traces of lead show up in a child’s blood test. The average blood-lead level among young U.S. children is under 1 microgram per deciliter of blood. “I don’t think ...

Associated media - Connected media Updated on Feb. 27 to include new company statements. A cyberattack on a unit affiliated with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, has disrupted drug prescription orders at thousands of pharmacies for about a week. The assault on the unit, Change Healthcare, a division of United’s Optum, was discovered last Wednesday. The attack appeared to be by a foreign country, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials, who expressed alarm at the extent of the disruption on Monday. UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate, said in a federal filing that it had been forced to disconnect some of Change Healthcare’s vast digital network from its clients, and as of Tuesday, had not been able to restore all of those services. The company has no...

Connected media - Linked media “My account on Meta is forever banned from making any advertising after I posted once under our company’s page about our CBD products and it was flagged,” said Clarice Coppolino, head of branding and product development for Vital Leaf, which makes CBD chocolate, skin care and tinctures. The Covid-19 pandemic also took a toll on the industry. While sales in the early weeks and months of the pandemic soared as nervous consumers sought relief through CBD-infused products, the interest among large companies and investors fell off. “Covid clearly shifted consumer packaged goods companies away from the CBD space and what was possible there to focusing on simply meeting food demand,” said Carmen Brace, a consultant who worked with companies that sell consumer ...

Kathy Goldman, who devoted her career as a civic leader to establishing food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to sustain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.The cause of death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, said.Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over five decades she worked with many collaborators to successfully lobby for federal subsidies like food stamps and nutrition assistance for women, children and infants; create partnerships between corporate providers of provisions and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include help with housing, health care, education and o...

Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health, steering it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases toward big-picture issues of fiscal and societal accountability in medicine, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 98.His son Jonathan Hiatt said the cause was pulmonary hypertension.Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt “made public health the conscience of medicine.”Early in his seven-decade career, Dr. Hiatt worked in Paris with future Nobel Prize winners on the discovery of messenger RNA, a key element of cellular biology. He later visited the White House to urge President Ronald Reagan to end the nucle...

The Alabama legislature on Wednesday approved legislation intended to make it possible for fertility clinics in the state to reopen without the specter of crippling lawsuits.But the measure, hastily written, does not address the legal question that led to clinic closings and set off a stormy, politically fraught national debate: Whether embryos that have been frozen and stored for possible future implantation have the legal status of human beings.The Alabama Supreme Court made such a finding last month, in the context of a claim against a Mobile clinic brought by three couples whose frozen embryos were inadvertently destroyed. The court ruled that under Alabama law, those embryos should be regarded as people, and that the couples were entitled to punitive damages for the wrongful death of ...

The drug company Atai Life Sciences is spending millions to research the compound, and congressional lawmakers from both parties have been pushing the government to promote ibogaine research for substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems.For Dr. Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami who began studying ibogaine in the early 1990s, the soaring interest is a vindication of her belief that the compound could help ameliorate the opioid crisis. “Ibogaine is not a silver bullet, and it won’t work for everybody, but it’s the most powerful addiction interrupter I’ve ever seen,” she said.Researchers have also been studying ibogaine’s ability to treat other difficult mental health problems. A small study published earlier this year in ...

As I.V.F. grew in popularity, so did the concerns of its opponents. Standard practice involves creating multiple embryos, which are screened for genetic abnormalities, and the ones that appear healthiest can be transferred. Extra embryos are often frozen; by one count, there are a million and a half frozen embryos in the United States. After a designated time period, they may be donated to science or destroyed, just as the Catholic Church feared.The anti-abortion movement won a partial victory for protecting life at conception in 2001, when President George W. Bush banned the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research, but President Barack Obama reversed the policy eight years later.Starting in the late 2000s, voters rejected ballot initiatives to enshrine fetal personhood in at...